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A Joyride to Beatsville

March 30, 2009

As you can imagine, for Slater there’s a lot of jetting back and forth these days between Los Angeles, New York and London. Then there’s life at home, where a little magic continues to brew with Beatsville, which I (along with a few other fortunate attendees) was able to catch a glimpse of at the National Alliance for Musical Theater (NAMT) new-works presentations this past October.
Beatsville is based on the Roger Corman cult film A Bucket of Blood. “As a script and as a film,” Slater says, “it’s very unformed. The characters aren’t really characters the way we think of them in theatrical terms-they’re more like placeholders in the narrative. But Wendy and I were attracted to the film precisely because it is short and not fully developed. We didn’t have to worry about dismantling a great film in order to resize it for the stage. For us the question was, ‘What do we need to add to make this a viable story?’ It was an idea in search of its final form.”

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Old Globe Will Reach Out to Students with New Hip-Hop Musical Kingdom in 2009

October 6, 2008

According to Old Globe, students and residents “will be given the opportunity to work with the author and Old Globe teaching artists to explore the art and story of Kingdom and explore elements of playwriting as hip-hop poetry, monologues and scenes. Students will also have the opportunity to create and perform their own original work.” Earlier developmental versions ofKingdom have garnered numerous accolades, including a 2008 Richard Rodgers Award, the Most Promising New Musical award at the 2006 New York Musical Theatre Festival.
The production was chosen to represent the United States at the 2008 International Community Arts Festival in the Netherlands last March. It also received acclaim at the 2007 NAMT (National Alliance for Musical Theater) Festival of New Musicals showcase.
“When I saw the showcase at the NAMT Festival last year, I knew that this wonderful, well crafted musical represented a great opportunity for the Globe to connect with a new audience,” stated Old Globe executive producer Louis G. Spisto. “What’s really exciting is that this new work, which has garnered so much acclaim throughout its initial development, is going to be performed both at the Globe and at a new state-of-the art 750-seat theatre in southeastern San Diego. The partnership between Lincoln High School and our creative team and staff will result in some amazing programs, as students, teachers, community residents and artists will work together throughout the development and performance schedule of Kingdom. Students and artists in southeastern San Diego will be mentored by professional hip-hop theatre artists and create their own work as part of the residency.”

NAMT News

'Vanities,' thy new name is 'musical'

August 24, 2008

And so, when the 30th anniversary began to loom, Heifner became more open to the notion of turning “Vanities” into a musical. A friend put him together with composer Kirshenbaum, whose best-known credit is the off-Broadway musical “Summer of ’42.”
The musical version of “Vanities” was showcased at the 2006 National Alliance for Musical Theatre Festival of New Musicals in New York and had its first production at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto that same year. …

Heifner’s long-standing reluctance to turn “Vanities” into a musical was based in part on the jobs he’d had rewriting other people’s musicals. “My experience of musicals has not been a lot of fun,” he admits. “I’ve tended to think that there are too many cooks on a musical. What I love about playwriting is that it’s usually just the playwright and the director, and you own it and you can pretty much control its destiny. That’s not true on a musical.”

NAMT News

'Drowsy Chaperone' was a surprise hit

July 20, 2008

That first “Drowsy” production, held at Toronto’s Rivoli nightclub, was just 35 minutes long. The response was so tremendous that Lambert, Martin and their high-school friend, Canadian actor-writer Don McKellar (“Slings & Arrows”) decided to retool it with Martin playing Man in Chair. Lambert and composer Greg Morrison wrote the songs; McKellar and Martin wrote the book.
They took it to the Toronto Fringe Festival and the 160-seat Theatre Passe Muraille the following year, where again it was a huge audience hit. “Drowsy” expanded into a full-length, big-stage production at Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre in 2001, then went into a four-year-limbo as the producers shopped it around.
A successful reading at the National Alliance for Musical Theater Festival for New Musicals in 2004 brought “Drowsy” to the attention of New York producer Kevin McCollum (“Rent,” “Avenue Q”), who decided to bring it to Broadway. After a successful Los Angeles tryout, it opened at the Marquis Theatre on Broadway in May 2006, and played 674 performances before closing in December 2007.
“It started as a drunken lark,” says Martin, who played Man in Chair in Toronto, New York and London. “It started as small as a show can possibly start. And then it just grew and grew until we had this $10 million-plus budget and won five Tonys and seven Drama Desk awards. It was this huge success … in a way we could never have imagined. I can talk about it frankly, because it seemed so surreal to me.”

NAMT News

Toronto musical Broadway-bound

April 9, 2008

Once the show had closed, they returned to New York (where they have been living since 2001) and took it to veteran director/lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. (Ain’t Misbehavin’, Miss Saigon) who had them rewrite the musical considerably.
At a presentation last fall at the National Alliance for Musical Theatre, The Story of My Life received standing ovations and most insiders felt it was only a matter of time until it was produced.